A Brill Calendar: June 16

Few strategies to avoid fame, admiration and/or notoriety as a professional beat intellectual labour within the Walls of Academe.

This is especially true for those studying law. While judges, barristers and attorneys can steal the show publicly, the theoretician in his library, at his writing-table and lecturing blithely away before a small audience obliged to digest the curriculum to the last morsel, has little to offer to a general public craving for sensation & sex, with drugs & rock-and-roll for seconds. Many a superb legal mind is an anonymous to posterity. A test might be to ask sophisticated friends who have graduated from prestigious universities, whether the name ‘Beccaria’ rings a bell; or ‘Jellinek’. For this second surname – forget about pasta-eaters – they may come up with a Canadian physician, who pioneered study of alcoholism, demonstrating relations between the development of large urban centres; but that is not the Jellinek you have in mind. They think of Elvin J. (1890 – 1963); or perhaps, and more likely, of Elfriede J. (1946), Nobel Prize Literature 2004, but her surname is spelled with just one l. Don’t exclude Adolf J. (1821 – 1893) from the ‘usual suspects’, foremost Jewish preacher and Kabbala scholar in ‘Kaiserlich und Königlich’ Vienna.

But it is seldom, if ever, that they come up with Georg Jellinek (Leipzig, June 16 1851 – Heidelberg January 12 1911) the legal philosopher, fathoming the theoretical depths of Law. This particular Jellinek saw his scholarly subject as an ethical minimum, needing popular approval to alter and transmute social and psychological realities into juridical norms. In the continuing story of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens’ (August 26, 1789 – early in the French Revolution) – Georg Jellinek (Adolf’s son, by the way and a convert to Christianity) is forever present, although largely forgotten. (And Cesare Beccaria (1738 – 1794)? The first scholar opposing capital punishment on rational grounds.)